The Teaching Philosophy: An Opportunity to Guide Practice ...

The Teaching Philosophy: An Opportunity to Guide Practice or an Exercise in Futility? Stacia M. Stribling

George Mason University Elizabeth K. DeMulder

George Mason University Sandra Barnstead

George Mason University Laura Dallman

George Mason University Abstract

This conceptual essay explores the role a teaching philosophy plays in the experiences of K-12 classroom teachers who are firmly established in a school context. We draw on our experiences as inservice teacher educators and K-12 teachers to examine the extent to which teachers make decisions that are grounded in a well-thought out and clearly articulated belief system about teaching and learning. We argue that there are often tensions and disconnections between teachers' fundamental beliefs about teaching and learning and the realities of current mandates and imposed expectations. Keywords: teacher professional development, teaching philosophy

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The Teaching Philosophy: An Opportunity to Guide Practice or an Exercise in Futility?

The majority of pre-service teachers do not complete their teacher training without first writing a Teaching Philosophy Statement. This assignment affords new teachers the opportunity to articulate their beliefs and understandings about effective teaching and learning by including descriptive examples of how they teach and by providing theory and research-based justifications for why they make particular pedagogical decisions. While the final product is useful for job applications and interviews, it is the reflective process used to create the document that is expected to serve the teacher well in guiding their day-to-day work in the classroom. In fact, Goodyear and Allchin (1998) contend that this statement is a living document that should be used throughout one's teaching career to drive and to continually reassess teaching goals. They state:

In preparing a statement of teaching philosophy, [teachers] assess and examine themselves to articulate the goals they wish to achieve in teaching. . . . A clear vision of a teaching philosophy provides stability, continuity, and long-term guidance. . . . A well?defined philosophy can help them remain focused on their teaching goals and to appreciate the personal and professional rewards of teaching (Goodyear & Allchin, 1998, pp. 106?7).

As in-service teacher educators and K-12 teachers, we wondered about the role a teaching philosophy plays in the experiences of K-12 classroom teachers who are firmly established in a school context. The little research that has been conducted in this area is inconclusive. Some studies show that teachers' beliefs and practices are not in alignment (Polly & Hannafin, 2011; Wilcox-Herzog, 2002), whereas other evidence suggests that teachers' beliefs and practices are concordant (Tsai, 2008). Ultimately, the relationship between teachers' beliefs and practices is complex and, as Basturkmen (2012) found in a review of the research related to the work of language teachers, is mediated by

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contexts and constraints. Therefore we wondered whether, once in the classroom, teachers experienced any tensions or disconnections between their fundamental beliefs about teaching and learning and the realities of current mandates and imposed expectations.

Our Context and Experiences

Author 1 and Author 2 teach in a Master's Degree program that is designed to develop in-service teachers' capacities to engage in critical pedagogy and critical literacy, school-based and communitybased inquiry, collaboration, teacher leadership and continuous improvement. The teaching philosophies of the faculty in this program are strongly rooted in social change, humanistic and progressive approaches, though the concern in exploring the teachers' philosophies was not to measure the extent to which they conformed to the program ideals. Rather, the purpose was to understand the extent to which teachers make decisions that are grounded in a well-thought out and clearly articulated belief system about teaching and learning.

From July 2011 through July 2013 the faculty worked with 41 graduate students who were enrolled in this cohort-based program and who had been teaching in K-12 settings for anywhere from 220 years. As part of their focus on teacher leadership, the teachers read Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Helping Teachers Develop as Leaders by Katzenmeyer and Moller (2009). Time was spent reflecting on what it means to be a teacher leader, examining assumptions about leadership, and developing the skills to lead from within the classroom. Katzenmeyer and Moller (2009) suggest a development model for teacher leadership that begins with teachers doing a personal assessment to better understand themselves in relation to others as both teachers and leaders. Part of this personal assessment is to examine their belief systems about teaching and learning by completing a Philosophy of Education Inventory (PEI) developed by Lorraine Zinn (1999). This inventory contains 15 sentence stems with five phrases to

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complete each stem. Each of the five phrases represents one of five educational philosophies: Behavioral, Comprehensive, Progressive, Humanistic, and Social Change. Using a Likert scale, teachers indicate the extent to which they agree with each of the phrases on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Responses are then coded and added to reveal a total score for each of the philosophies.

The teachers completed the PEI after one year of the two-year program. In debriefing the activity, it became clear that many of the teachers' scores did not place them squarely in one or even two of the five philosophies; the majority of them had relatively high scores in multiple categories. Very few disagreed (especially strongly disagreed) with any of the statements. For example, under the sentence stem "The primary purpose of education is:" the five phrases to complete the stem were:

1. To facilitate the personal growth and development of each student. 2. To increase students' awareness of the need for significant change in our culture and society, and

to help them contribute to such change. 3. To teach a broad range of content, concepts, and principles that will prepare students for learning

throughout life. 4. To increase students' problem-solving skills and ability to fully participate in the society in

which they live. 5. To develop students' competency and mastery of specific knowledge and skills, so they can meet

certain standards or expectations. Some teachers strongly agreed with all five of these statements. This puzzled us since the underlying assumptions within some of the philosophies are quite contradictory; within a Behavioral philosophy of education, the purpose of education is "to promote skill development and behavioral change; ensure compliance with standards and societal expectations," while the purpose within a Humanistic

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philosophy is "to enhance personal growth and development; to facilitate self-actualization" (Katzenmeyer & Moller, 2009, p. 184). How was it that our teachers equally connected with both of these philosophies?

We began to develop several potential hypotheses based on what we were seeing. Perhaps the survey was not particularly valid; was it truly measuring teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning or was it actually measuring teachers' practical survival strategies for navigating the standards movement that left them with very little autonomy to teach what they believed? Did our teachers mix their responses, sometimes answering in reference to their personally held beliefs and sometimes responding on the basis of this survival practice? Do our varying results illustrate discordance between a teacher's philosophy and practice? Were the teachers trying to please us by responding in a way they thought we expected based on our program's content? Do teachers tend to take a both/and rather than an either/or approach to maintain a macro philosophy that attempts to take into account the wide-ranging and comprehensive expectations of education writ large? Evidence suggests that individuals are especially likely to respond in a socially desirable way when the subject of the survey is considered important by the surrounding culture (Helmes & Holden, 2002).

Perhaps the survey was not reliable: were the statements so general that responses were overly contingent on the teachers' choice of context (e.g., "During reading instruction I would take this particular approach, but during math instruction I would take a different approach")? Bos, Mathers, Dickson, Podhajski, and Chard (2001) also found that teachers endorsed a wide array of differing philosophies when using a Likert scale.

We decided to dig deeper and asked the teachers to write a teaching philosophy narrative as part of their final portfolio for the program. We hoped this would obviate the concerns raised by the use of

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